May 19, 2025 • 40 mins
Jess and Jake speak with Sarah and learn about her past life. As a social worker, she really knew how to listen to people. But when Jake and Jess interview two of Sarah's former friends, a darker picture emerges.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake. I hope you enjoyed our season
The Truth about Sarah. We'll be having a live event
later this year. It's going to be a conversation between
me and my co host Jess McHugh, and we want
to hear from you too. What questions do you have
(00:37):
for us about this season? Send your questions to deep
Cover at Pushkin dot fm. That's deep Cover All one
word at Pushkin dot fm and stay tuned for more
details on this event. Previously on deep Cover.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
She explained to me that she just got out of
the Marine Corps and she needed help with some car
payments because she was waiting for via disability to kick out.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
She was very likable, she was very charismatic, and then
on top of it, she was a veteran and badass
and had these injuries. We would kind of quietly make
sure that when she was in our environment at the gym,
she was protected.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
So I call up our records keeper and I say, hey,
I need a copy of her DD Form two fourteen
and he said, ooh, she just left my house two
hours ago. She came here to the house to come
get it. That's when I start thinking something's not right here, So.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Like here, right when I get up in the morning,
I make it a point to go outside.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
This is Sarah Katanaugh. She's the person you've been hearing
about for the past two episodes, and.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Like, step outside by myself, see the sunrise, look at
the view because the view behind overlooks the mountains, and
really enjoy that and just let that be the start
of my day versus some of the intrusive thoughts about
the past that would come up before, and I would
let that dictate my day. So I've really changed how
(02:32):
I let the past affect my moods, so I don't
become just a continuous repetition of them.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Jess and I spent the better part of several days
interviewing Sarah. We talked about her past and her life
now and a great many other things too.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
How we found her, where we found her. We'll get there.
You're going to hear from her throughout the rest of
the season, but for now, we just want you to
hear some of the very first things that she said
to us in person, so that you get a read
on her just like we did. We started with small talk,
like read any good books lately?
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Right now? I am reading The Secret History by Donna Tart,
which is interesting. I had read Goldfinch The Goldfinch and
I loved it, so now I'm reading this one, and
I'm really enjoying it so far.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
This was just a few minutes into our first conversation.
At this point, I knew a fair amount about Sarah Cavanaugh,
what she'd done, about all the people she deceived and hurt.
I had a pretty good picture in my head of
who she was, and this this was not it. This woman, well,
she sounded more like a high school guidance counselor or
(03:50):
the type of person you'd hope would be taking care
of your grandma the senior citizen home. In fact, she
told us working with seniors that was her first job.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
So I was in undergrad working at an assisted living.
I worked there for five and a half years, and
I loved it. I did every thing from serving in
the dining room to running activities to housekeeping. I did
anything they asked me to do to basically pay my
rent and pay my tuition and kind of survive undergrad
(04:22):
at all costs. But I developed really meaningful relationships with
the residents.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Right as I sat there listening to her. I noticed
Sarah was doing this a lot, ending a sentence by
saying right. It's kind of subtle. She doesn't yank you
through her version of events. It's more like she was
feeling around for things that we might have in common,
and if we nodded along, she'd say right.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
A lot of people don't like older people. I remember
a lot of people I worked with who were like,
she's grouchy, or she's this, or she's that, And I thought, well,
they've had fifty years to practice right type thing. And also, like,
I always think about our moods as a product of
something else, right, I know that personally, and so I
(05:11):
just think there was an appreciation there for me. But
I didn't really know where that was going to go.
I think I thought I was going to be like
an activities director or something like that.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
But instead she got her master's and became a social worker.
Eventually she got a job at the local VA in Providence,
Rhode Island. That was her job, helping veterans in some
pretty tough situations. And this is one hundred percent true.
By the way, many of these people coming to Sarah
for help, they showed up maybe on a Saturday kind
(05:44):
of reluctantly, and it was Sarah's job to put them
at ease.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
I would just say, hey, how are you like, it's Saturday,
you know, what's how do you feel about this? How
do you feel about being here? And if they were like,
I really don't want to be here. I had to
get up early and I had to drive to Providence,
and I'd be like, yeah, I understand.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
When her clients did open up. Sarah took this approach.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
When someone said something like I'm you know, I'm struggling
with I might be homeless, or my my wife and
I are fighting, or something like that, I wouldn't respond
with surprise. I would just be like, yeah, those things happen.
Those things happen, and okay, what do you think you
(06:30):
need right now?
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Because of that, what she never wanted to do was
send veterans elsewhere to some other program, you know, push
them off on someone else.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
I know that when I've opened up and told people things,
if they've turned away from it because it makes them uncomfortable,
I've then kind of thought, oh, this makes other people
feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Shouldn't talk about this, right?
Speaker 4 (06:53):
And I don't want to do that to them, but
you have to be present in a way that silently
says I get it.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
When she talked about her old life as a social worker,
I got this strange sense that I was seeing the
Sarah Kavanaugh that won over everybody's hearts. Because, let's be clear,
the people we interviewed for this story, once upon a time,
they all loved Sarah, and listening to her talk, started
to understand why she knew, in her own words, how
(07:29):
to be present in a way that silently says, I
get it. It's weird to say, but I found her
really likable by the time we met in person. I've
been talking to her over the phone for nearly a year,
and I've been hearing about all the terrible things she'd
done for just as long. Sarah, she seems pretty aware
(07:49):
of her effect on people then and now, of all
the ways big and small said and unsaid that people
come to trust each other to trust her.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right,
and I maximized that while I was lying people. When
you create space, people fill that space. And I had
always been really I had always been able to kind
of keep my mouth shut and be quiet and not
share anything. I'd really learned that really well.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Sarah went on from there, talking about her old job
and who she once was, because, as you might have guessed,
she's no longer a social worker. She has another life now,
very different life, one in which she has a great
deal of time to think about what she did and
the people she hurt most.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
I don't think it's ever going to be easy to
think about the people I hurt, and because these are
people that even before they knew I heard them right,
I was hurting them right because I was lying to them.
And they were people I called every day, that I
spent most of my weekends with, that they were my friends,
(09:16):
some of them my best friends. And I think about
that now, I mean, that's really hard.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
When Sarah says this, she's really talking about two people
who trusted her deeply. In this episode, we're going to
hear from both of them. And these aren't just stories
about friendship. They're about what happens when you meet someone
a confidant who seems to get you and understand what
you're going through, someone who listens quietly with what seems
(09:51):
like empathy. But here in lies the danger. What if
that very person takes your most personal struggles and uses
them to their advantage, sees them as an opportunity. Then
the line between empathy and manipulation is thinner than we'd
care to admit. And sometimes the people who know us
(10:14):
best are the ones we should fear the most. I'm
Jay Calburn and I'm Jess mchuughe and this is Deep
(10:36):
Cover Season six, The Truth About Sarah, Episode three, The Confidante.
Speaker 5 (11:20):
Last fall, Jake and I, along with our producer Amy,
went on a road trip to Rhode Island. We wanted
to meet the people in Sarah's inner circle, people who
were closest to her, who each knew some part of
the truth. One morning, Amy and I went to meet
someone named Sam. We're just going to use her first
name to protect her privacy. We spoke at her boyfriend's house,
(11:43):
sitting around the kitchen table. Sam is in her fifties
with short blonde hair. She's a physical therapist and for
years she was Sarah's physical therapist.
Speaker 6 (11:54):
She was really kind. She definitely knew me, and she
knew I think what I wanted to talk about type thing,
if that makes sense.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
What was it that drew you to her in those early.
Speaker 6 (12:10):
Yeaies, it definitely was her intelligence. I mean her intelligence
like just sparked something in me.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
Sarah and Sam first met in the fall of twenty eighteen,
just a few months after Sarah's wedding to Nicole, the
wedding attended by all her VFW friends. By this point,
Sarah was fully immersed in this veteran role. Sam told
me about the moment when Sarah first came in for
a consultation.
Speaker 6 (12:37):
She was really quiet and reserved.
Speaker 7 (12:41):
You know.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
She answered questions, but very kind of matter of fact,
definitely seemed like things were she was uncomfortable with, Like
she didn't want me to look at her hip.
Speaker 5 (12:53):
This was the Sarah who, in her own words, had
always been able to quote, keep her mouth shut and
be quiet and not share anything, someone who let the
silences do the talking. But Sarah did say she had
been injured in Iraq.
Speaker 6 (13:07):
She said they hit an id and she got hit
with the door that got blown in and a hitter
and the hit. She wasn't really limping this because this
wasn't a brand new injury. This is something that happened
a long time ago, so it was more like a
chronic thing.
Speaker 5 (13:20):
Sam had worked with trauma patients before, so when Sarah
didn't want to show Sam her scar, she didn't push. Plus,
she already knew a little about Sarah's supposed military past
because one of Sarah's Jim buddies had connected them. Sarah
got into a routine of twice weekly pt with Sam,
and eventually the Wounded Warrior Project started paying for it.
(13:44):
Sarah was part of their Independence Program. It's super selective
program for the most severely wounded veterans, usually people with
traumatic brain injuries, which Sarah claimed she had. Over many
months of these weekly appointments, these two women became friends.
They talk about nature, gardening, or books they both love reading.
(14:07):
They also talked about more in smith things. Sam was
recently divorced, and Sarah told her in that way she
does so well, I get it. My marriage isn't working
out either. Yeah, that's right. Sarah told Sam that she
was also getting divorced.
Speaker 6 (14:26):
It was less than a year after they got married
that she said that just the marriage wasn't working out
and did they were separated, but she also said they
did have an open marriage.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
None of this was true, at least not according to
Sarah's wife, Nicole. At the time, they were still living together,
still married, and not in an open marriage. But that's
not what she told Sam. This, by the way, is
also classic Sarah, as we've learned, and it's a pattern
(15:00):
I've seen with women scammers in general. They often find
emotional common ground with victims, even when that shared trauma
is totally made up. And it worked.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
I think, like anything, basically, just you spend more time
with someone and then you just appreciate who that person is,
and then you find yourself wanting to spend more and
more time. We just like enjoyed our time together and
then it just turned into more.
Speaker 5 (15:31):
And by more, Sam means Sam and Sarah went from
having a professional relationship to a friendship to a love
affair one that was really romantic. Started going on a
ton of trips together.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
Let's see, we went to Florida, we went to Vail,
we went to the Bahamas, so we went to California,
and then like you know, little driving around New England
type stuff, and it wasn't just a fling.
Speaker 5 (16:03):
Their lives became really entwined. Much of this I actually
learned from other interviews. Sarah would talk about Sam as
her partner so much that it got really confusing for
us as we reported this. There were times I would
talk to someone for this story and they'd mentioned Sarah's
significant other, and I had to double check, who did
(16:25):
you think was Sarah's wife? A woman named Sam or
a woman named Nicole. Oftentimes people said Sam Sarah was
living a full on double life with Sam, a second
double life because she was still living with her actual
wife at the time, Nicole. Still, Sarah found a way
to spend lots of time with Sam. In fact, Sarah
(16:48):
and Sam would socialize with Sarah's VFW pals. Sam met
Sarah's mom and a brother. Sarah told Sam she was
really close with her five siblings and talked about them
all the time.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
She told me that she had a twin who was
also marine and died in combat, and then she had
two older brothers and they were all like in the military. Yeah,
and she said that her dad was a two star general.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
Sarah would show Sam pictures of her five brothers with
their wives and kids, Brody, Joel, Oliver. She'd tell her
about their marriage spats, or what they were dealing with
at work, about their childhood growing up in Georgia. One
brother in particular was worrying Sarah Joel. She told Sam
(17:33):
that he was also a VET who now did private
military contracting.
Speaker 6 (17:39):
He decided that he was going to do this mission
because they would make a lot of money for these missions.
Speaker 5 (17:45):
Sarah told Sam that while Joel was on this mission,
he got shot and ended up in a coma, and
that her mom flew to the Middle East to bring
him back to the US, but the doctors couldn't revive him.
They told Sarah that he would never wake up. One day,
(18:06):
Sarah tells Sam, I need to fly to Georgia now.
I have to be the one to take him off
of life support.
Speaker 6 (18:16):
I said, I'll go with you, and this is gonna
be a really hard thing. I'll go with you. You know,
we can fly down there and you know I can
support you. And She's like, no, no, it's fine, I'll do it.
And she called me at two o'clock in the morning.
I'll never freak. She called me at two o'clock in
the morning and said that it's done and he was gone.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
Sam was devastated for Sarah. Here was this woman dealing
with all of these injuries and now this, and just
to zoom out for a second because it can be
easy to get lost in Sarah's world. The people in
those photos that Sarah shared, they were real people with
(18:53):
real lives of their own. They just weren't Sarah's brothers.
This version of Sarah, the person with the big military
family from Georgia, it's someone only a few people saw.
And my take is that. But maybe it's because she
couldn't really let Sam into her family life, because her
(19:14):
whole family had watched her Mary Nicole, they'd been to
the home that she and Cole still shared. But I
think it's deeper than that. Sarah seems to have understood
something fundamental. Tragedy brings us together, whether it's a friendship
or a romantic partnership. Being vulnerable enough with another person
(19:37):
to let them help you through a crisis, stand by
you at a funeral or a hospital bed. This is
where real intimacy is created, and Sarah seems to have
taken this idea and just run with it. Same of course,
didn't know any of this at the time. She continued
(19:58):
bringing Sarah deeper into her world, her real world.
Speaker 6 (20:03):
She was very very meshed into my life. She knew
my family intimately.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
Sam's mother has been battle stage three ovarian cancer for years.
So while Sam drove her mother up to Boston for
treatment at Dana Farber, Sarah would help out. She'd help
Sam's kids with their homework, plan meals for the family,
walk her mother's dog, and get this. While Sam was
taking care of her mother's illness, holding her hand through chemo,
(20:29):
she was also doing the same for Sarah. Sarah had
told her the cancer lie too, said she had lung cancer.
Sarah told Sam, I'm terrified, overwhelmed with medical results. I
just can't take any more bad news. So Sam started
receiving Sarah's test results, and then she would be the
(20:50):
one to relay those results to Sarah more than once.
Sam remembers sitting anxiously in her pet practice, refreshing her email,
waiting for results to come in.
Speaker 6 (21:03):
I remember crying in my practice, getting bad, bad news,
But then I remember getting really great news and then
being able to tell her and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 8 (21:12):
It was a big rollercoaster.
Speaker 9 (21:15):
It's awful.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
It was awful. Yeah, there was a lot of emotional
strife on my part, you know, a lot.
Speaker 5 (21:24):
As both Sarah's partner and her caregiver. Sam was in
Sarah's world twice over totally enmeshed. Fast forward to January
twenty twenty two, the moment when everything started to spiral
out of control. News was getting around that Sarah may
(21:47):
have lied about a great many things, including her service
in the Marines, her medals, possibly even her claims of
having cancer. When the news first reached Sam, she was
in total disbelief. She'd seen a pile of proof over
the years, her enrollment in the Wounded Warrior Independent Program,
(22:10):
years of blood work that she'd received directly from the VA.
Sam was trying to wrap her head around this, so
she hopped on the phone with one of Sarah's VFW buddies,
a guy named Justin. Had gotten to know each other
over the years. She wanted his perspective.
Speaker 6 (22:26):
Can you believe this?
Speaker 8 (22:26):
This is crazy.
Speaker 6 (22:27):
Someone's making this up, you know, Like, why would they
do this? Why would they make this up about her?
This is insane, Sam told Justin.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
I've seen years of medical documents, even her cancer diagnosis.
There's no way Sarah's lying. How would someone even make
that up? More after the break.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
While Jess was meeting with Sam, I was just a
few miles away meeting with Justin. He's the guy that
Sam called to get a reality check. When the rumors
first started, Justin was one of Sarah's buddies from the VFW,
and initially, like Sam, he was very much in disbelief.
Even now, knowing everything he knows about Sarah, Justin still
(23:26):
struggles to wrap his head around everything that happened.
Speaker 9 (23:30):
I'll be honest, I was a little hesitant to kind
of relive this, but I think now we're going to
tell a story, I think it needs to be told fully,
and so that's that's why I'm here.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Justin is in his early fifties. He's fit, he looks
like he could be part of a marketing campaign for
Peloton or something, and he has this really disarming, gentle
energy about him. Feels like an old soul to me.
I wanted to talk to Justin for a whole bunch
of reasons, but mainly because Justin's story. It's really compelling
(24:08):
in its own right, which is probably why Sarah was
drawn to it. Justin spent most of his career as
an officer in the Navy as an aviator, and when
he looks back on his life on all the dangers,
all the near misses, all those moments that quietly changed
the course of things. He often thinks back to two
(24:30):
thousand and eight, when he was in his mid thirties
stationed in Iraq, and what he remembers is the fog.
The fog came every night, thick and heavy with the wind.
It got so bad some nights they could barely breathe
this fog. It would stay with Justin in the years
to come in ways that he could never have foreseen.
(24:53):
It would lead him right into the haze of Sarah
Kavanaugh's deceptions. The fog in Iraq. It started like this.
Speaker 9 (25:03):
We weren't on a base called Taji, which is outside
of Baghdad, and we're we lived. We had this kind
of compound area. It was about fifty yards from a
burn pit. And at night the wind would shift and
our whole living area was enveloped in what was a fog.
(25:25):
You couldn't you. You could barely see in front of you,
a fog of what smelt like burning plastic. Every night.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
This fog that Justin's talking about, it's really a miasma
of smoke and fumes. It came from a burn pit,
which is how the military disposed of waste in both
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 9 (25:47):
Like, when you eat, there's no there's not there's no
water to do dishes. So when you go eat, everything
is off plastic and that all gets thrown away. They
dig a big pit. They throw all this stuff, plastic,
medical waste, batteries, whatever, into this giant pit. They throw
jet fuel on it and they light it on fire.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Justin was responsible for nearly five HUND service members. Their
safety was on his shoulders, and he and his leadership
team were worried about the long term effects of the fog.
Speaker 9 (26:19):
We knew this wasn't gonna be good, right, and the
contractor kept claiming that they do They did air tests
and it was it was, it was okay, But I
didn't buy that for a second.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Then one day it all kind of came to a head.
Speaker 9 (26:34):
My master chief and I actually drove out there to
the burn pit because we just saw this thick black
smoke coming out, and we're like, what the hell's going on?
And we went out there and you know, just like
yelled at the guy basically like what the hell are
you doing?
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Justin says the contractor just shrugged and said that's what
I was told to do. No explanations, just business as usual.
It would be more than a decade later before Justin
learned the real consequences of those burn pits. By then,
he was living in Rhode Island with his wife and
three kids. He was happily retired from the military. All
(27:14):
was good until he started to feel this small ache.
Speaker 9 (27:18):
I felt like, what it was a slightly pinched nerve
on my left chest. And you know, I exercise, so
I get pinched nerves and stuff for once in a while.
So I'm like, oh, it'll just go away.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
But it didn't go away, and eventually Justin's doctor at
the VA suggested that he get a CT scan just
to be safe. That's when they found the mass in
his lungs. At first, the doctors told him not to worry.
It probably wasn't anything too serious. I mean, he was
so young, so healthy, so fit. But then he went
(27:53):
to see a pulmonologist at the VA and learned he
had stage four lung cancer.
Speaker 9 (28:00):
It was a huge shock. I'm working out, I'm healthy,
everything's going great, and then someone tells you you're about
to die. I just like I couldn't wrap my brain
around it. My wife was I just kind of like
broke down.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Justin says his wife had always been his lifeline. Even so,
this cancer diagnosis was uncharted territory for Justin and his family.
Speaker 9 (28:30):
When you know you're dying, it's a very lonely thing.
I mean, it's very comforting that I have a family
around me and a wife to support me and everything.
But at the same time, you're the one that's dying
and you're the one going through this personally, and it
(28:51):
feels like you're very much alone.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
But he did have someone who seemed to get it
at a personal level, and that was Sarah Kavanaugh. Sarah
and Justin knew each other from the VFW. They've been
close for several years, ever since Justin joined the Post
back in two thousand. In seventeen, and that whole time,
Sarah herself claimed that she had been fighting cancer, lung cancer.
(29:17):
Sarah claimed the cancer came from her military service, claimed
her vehicle had been hit by an ied and she'd
inhaled the metal particles in the blast. For some people,
cancer is now a chronic condition, something you can manage
and live with, and that seemed to be the case
with Sarah.
Speaker 9 (29:37):
So I immediately went to Sarah, thinking, okay, well, there's
someone going through the same experience I am. I don't
feel so lonely anymore. I was still scared, but what
she was sharing, what her experience was someone who's already
started this journey is telling me, you know, things are
going to be okay. That definitely helped.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Sarah had always been a friend, but in this moment,
their friendship seemed to take on a deeper meaning.
Speaker 9 (30:07):
No one really was in my shoes except her. At
least that's what I thought, here's another veteran that's going
through the same thing I'm going through, so at least
she knows we can support each other. And then we
started actually opening up more about our treatments and how
our treatments were going.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Sarah told Justin she was on an experimental dose of
an immunotherapy drug and it was working, but according to Sarah,
the VA was cutting back on her treatment. This story
hit home for Justin. He'd faced his own bureaucratic roadblocks
within the VA. In fact, he'd eventually gone outside the
(30:48):
system to Dana Farber in Boston to get the experimental
treatment that he needed, and it seemed to be working,
which gave Justin an idea.
Speaker 9 (30:59):
I thought well, Dana Farbers is this amazing place, and
I know that they can help her. And I said, well,
do you have private health insurance because you need to
go to someplace like Dana Farber and get real help,
because the VA is not going to help you. And
she said, well, I don't have or I can't afford it.
(31:19):
She just kept saying like she couldn't. That was too
much for her.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
The whole thing was frustrating for Justin, and he felt
like he couldn't just sit there and do nothing.
Speaker 9 (31:30):
We veterans look out for each other, and I'm not
going to sit here and let a fellow what I
thought at the time was a fellow veteran die from
lack of treatment when I know there's an alternative if
I can help it. So I said, look, I will
at least begin by paying for this insurance for you
(31:56):
to be able to go to Dana Farber.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
It was an incredibly generous offer, which Sarah turned down.
Speaker 9 (32:05):
She initially said no, I can't ask you to do that, No, no, no,
but then she kept telling me that, you know, she
wasn't doing well, and eventually, you know, I said, look,
I don't want you to die.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
At last, Sarah agreed. In the months that followed, Justin
gave her money to pay for private insurance, over five
thousand dollars in total, all in the hope that it
would keep her alive. Then one day, Justin gets a
call from Dave Ainslie at the VFW. You know, the
(32:42):
guy with the handlebar mustache. He was the previous commander
at the post before Sarah.
Speaker 9 (32:50):
Dave told me like, hey, you know, like I got
to tell you something about Sarah, and she's you know,
she's fake, She's not a veteran, and I was just
in shock and trying to just like wrap my brain
around it.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Dave explained how he tried to retrieve Sarah's discharge papers
her d D two fourteen, and how Sarah had been
one step ahead of him, absconding with the paperwork before
Dave could get his hands on it. Justin says that
he believed Dave, but part of him resisted, part of
him was in denial. He kept asking himself, who would
(33:25):
do something like this and why. Around this exact same time,
rumors began to swirl about Sarah being a fraud, and
then Justin heard from Sam. Her head was also spinning,
trying to make sense of all this.
Speaker 9 (33:43):
Sam and I talked on the phone and Sam was
still in i think, still in denial, and said, this
is not true. She actually does have cancer. I've seen
the record, her medical records.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Because remember Sam, she'd seen all the proof, the wounded
Warrior enrollment forms, stacks of medical records, someone claiming to
be Sarah's VA caseworker had even sent Sam official docum,
blood work, diagnoses, intake forms. It all looked legit. It
(34:15):
was enough to give Justin a moment of pause.
Speaker 9 (34:19):
There was a little bit of a question in my mind.
I'd say, she's actually seen medical records. What does that mean?
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Like, was there some other explanation here, a story that
made sense of it all, that turned the world right
side up again and somehow transformed Sarah back into Sarah.
And if not, well, then so many other questions bubbled
to the surface, like where did that stack of medical
records come from? And what if the rumors were true?
(34:50):
What did that mean for Justin? If the one person
who got it, who'd been through it, what if that
person was just performing, mimicking his own pain, where did
that leave him?
Speaker 5 (35:10):
In the days after that phone conversation with justin. Sam
still held on to the hope that maybe this was
just some terrible misunderstanding. Sarah kept maintaining her innocence, saying
she had the paperwork to prove it. Sam says she
believed it, maybe because she wanted to believe it. At
(35:32):
one point, Sam was driving to work and talking to
Sarah on the phone about all of this. She got frustrated.
She asked Sarah, begged her, really.
Speaker 6 (35:44):
Where's the paperwork? And she's like, I can't find it.
I'm like, what what do you mean you can't find it?
You're the most organized person I know. And she's like
then she said, it's all a lie. And I was like, wait, wait,
were you.
Speaker 7 (35:56):
Ever in the military?
Speaker 5 (35:59):
And that's when Sarah finally said it, a one word confession. No,
she'd never been in the military.
Speaker 6 (36:08):
I literally turned around and I was going to my work.
I turned around and I went right to her house.
Speaker 5 (36:13):
What was that drive?
Speaker 6 (36:15):
Like, I don't even remember. I don't even remember like
that drive. I don't remember walking into her house. I
remember sitting on her couch and like me like telling her,
asking her is this real?
Speaker 7 (36:27):
Is this real?
Speaker 6 (36:27):
Is this real?
Speaker 7 (36:28):
Is this real? You know?
Speaker 8 (36:30):
And she was like no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
It was an avalanche of betrayals. The cancer, the military service,
the family down in Georgia, the brother she'd taken off
life support. None of it was true. Sarah had been
lying to her every single day for years about nearly everything,
even things unrelated to her stolen valor scam, like still
(36:57):
being married to Nicole, and in doing so, she had
made Sam the other woman. We actually talked to Sarah
about this very moment.
Speaker 4 (37:08):
I remember her coming to my house and having that
conversation and her sitting on the couch across from me
and telling her the truth, like watching it hit her,
you know, watching it overcome her. It was like watching
her heartbreak, you know. And she started to cry and
told me she couldn't do this and how could I
(37:30):
do it? And all of those things.
Speaker 5 (37:34):
Sarah had spent hours and hours with Sam and her
family in their home, nursed the wounds of Sam's divorce,
helps her find happiness again. Sarah hurt Sam in all
of these intimate, profound ways, and then she made that pain, dirty, shameful.
Speaker 8 (37:53):
I'm still coping with it. Would it be upset?
Speaker 7 (37:58):
Now?
Speaker 6 (38:09):
Will come up and I'll be like, oh did that
really happen, and I think probably not, it was probably
a lie.
Speaker 8 (38:18):
Because I'll still like be.
Speaker 7 (38:20):
Like driving or whatever, and then memory will come and
they I'll be like, oh, I wonder how Brody's doing,
like things like that, you know, like it's so crazy.
Speaker 5 (38:32):
To me, Brody one of Sarah's fake brothers. Memories like
this come back to Sam even now. And then there
was the fact that Sarah was also Sam's patient, that
she'd been getting physical therapy from her for years, and
some of those bills had been paid for by a
(38:52):
wounded warrior. That meant that the very basis of their
relationship was a theft, a crime. She sat on the
couch confronting Sarah, the implications became crystal clear.
Speaker 6 (39:06):
I was like, oh my god. I was like, you
basically stole money. And I said to go, You're gonna
go to jail, Sarah, And She's like, you think.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
Next time. On deep Cover, I said.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Like, hey, we are at your house.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
It's the police. Are you in the house.
Speaker 4 (39:32):
We need you to come to the door.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy
Gaines McQuaid and Tali Emlin, additional production support by Sonya Gerwit.
Speaker 5 (39:52):
Our show is edited by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer
is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara.
Our show art was designed by Sean Carney, fact checking
by A Robbins.
Speaker 5 (40:10):
Special thanks to Sarah Nis, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake
Flanagan and Greta Cone. Additional thanks to Vicki Merrick, I'm
Jess McHugh.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
And I'm Jake Halpern. My co host, Jess McHugh is
currently researching a book on female con artists.
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake. I hope you enjoyed our season
The Truth about Sarah. We'll be having a live event
later this year. It's going to be a conversation between
me and my co host Jess McHugh, and we want
to hear from you too. What questions do you have
(00:37):
for us about this season? Send your questions to deep
Cover at Pushkin dot fm. That's deep Cover All one
word at Pushkin dot fm and stay tuned for more
details on this event. Previously on deep Cover.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
She explained to me that she just got out of
the Marine Corps and she needed help with some car
payments because she was waiting for via disability to kick out.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
She was very likable, she was very charismatic, and then
on top of it, she was a veteran and badass
and had these injuries. We would kind of quietly make
sure that when she was in our environment at the gym,
she was protected.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
So I call up our records keeper and I say, hey,
I need a copy of her DD Form two fourteen
and he said, ooh, she just left my house two
hours ago. She came here to the house to come
get it. That's when I start thinking something's not right here, So.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Like here, right when I get up in the morning,
I make it a point to go outside.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
This is Sarah Katanaugh. She's the person you've been hearing
about for the past two episodes, and.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Like, step outside by myself, see the sunrise, look at
the view because the view behind overlooks the mountains, and
really enjoy that and just let that be the start
of my day versus some of the intrusive thoughts about
the past that would come up before, and I would
let that dictate my day. So I've really changed how
(02:32):
I let the past affect my moods, so I don't
become just a continuous repetition of them.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Jess and I spent the better part of several days
interviewing Sarah. We talked about her past and her life
now and a great many other things too.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
How we found her, where we found her. We'll get there.
You're going to hear from her throughout the rest of
the season, but for now, we just want you to
hear some of the very first things that she said
to us in person, so that you get a read
on her just like we did. We started with small talk,
like read any good books lately?
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Right now? I am reading The Secret History by Donna Tart,
which is interesting. I had read Goldfinch The Goldfinch and
I loved it, so now I'm reading this one, and
I'm really enjoying it so far.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
This was just a few minutes into our first conversation.
At this point, I knew a fair amount about Sarah Cavanaugh,
what she'd done, about all the people she deceived and hurt.
I had a pretty good picture in my head of
who she was, and this this was not it. This woman, well,
she sounded more like a high school guidance counselor or
(03:50):
the type of person you'd hope would be taking care
of your grandma the senior citizen home. In fact, she
told us working with seniors that was her first job.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
So I was in undergrad working at an assisted living.
I worked there for five and a half years, and
I loved it. I did every thing from serving in
the dining room to running activities to housekeeping. I did
anything they asked me to do to basically pay my
rent and pay my tuition and kind of survive undergrad
(04:22):
at all costs. But I developed really meaningful relationships with
the residents.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Right as I sat there listening to her. I noticed
Sarah was doing this a lot, ending a sentence by
saying right. It's kind of subtle. She doesn't yank you
through her version of events. It's more like she was
feeling around for things that we might have in common,
and if we nodded along, she'd say right.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
A lot of people don't like older people. I remember
a lot of people I worked with who were like,
she's grouchy, or she's this, or she's that, And I thought, well,
they've had fifty years to practice right type thing. And also, like,
I always think about our moods as a product of
something else, right, I know that personally, and so I
(05:11):
just think there was an appreciation there for me. But
I didn't really know where that was going to go.
I think I thought I was going to be like
an activities director or something like that.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
But instead she got her master's and became a social worker.
Eventually she got a job at the local VA in Providence,
Rhode Island. That was her job, helping veterans in some
pretty tough situations. And this is one hundred percent true.
By the way, many of these people coming to Sarah
for help, they showed up maybe on a Saturday kind
(05:44):
of reluctantly, and it was Sarah's job to put them
at ease.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
I would just say, hey, how are you like, it's Saturday,
you know, what's how do you feel about this? How
do you feel about being here? And if they were like,
I really don't want to be here. I had to
get up early and I had to drive to Providence,
and I'd be like, yeah, I understand.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
When her clients did open up. Sarah took this approach.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
When someone said something like I'm you know, I'm struggling
with I might be homeless, or my my wife and
I are fighting, or something like that, I wouldn't respond
with surprise. I would just be like, yeah, those things happen.
Those things happen, and okay, what do you think you
(06:30):
need right now?
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Because of that, what she never wanted to do was
send veterans elsewhere to some other program, you know, push
them off on someone else.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
I know that when I've opened up and told people things,
if they've turned away from it because it makes them uncomfortable,
I've then kind of thought, oh, this makes other people
feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Shouldn't talk about this, right?
Speaker 4 (06:53):
And I don't want to do that to them, but
you have to be present in a way that silently
says I get it.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
When she talked about her old life as a social worker,
I got this strange sense that I was seeing the
Sarah Kavanaugh that won over everybody's hearts. Because, let's be clear,
the people we interviewed for this story, once upon a time,
they all loved Sarah, and listening to her talk, started
to understand why she knew, in her own words, how
(07:29):
to be present in a way that silently says, I
get it. It's weird to say, but I found her
really likable by the time we met in person. I've
been talking to her over the phone for nearly a year,
and I've been hearing about all the terrible things she'd
done for just as long. Sarah, she seems pretty aware
(07:49):
of her effect on people then and now, of all
the ways big and small said and unsaid that people
come to trust each other to trust her.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right,
and I maximized that while I was lying people. When
you create space, people fill that space. And I had
always been really I had always been able to kind
of keep my mouth shut and be quiet and not
share anything. I'd really learned that really well.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Sarah went on from there, talking about her old job
and who she once was, because, as you might have guessed,
she's no longer a social worker. She has another life now,
very different life, one in which she has a great
deal of time to think about what she did and
the people she hurt most.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
I don't think it's ever going to be easy to
think about the people I hurt, and because these are
people that even before they knew I heard them right,
I was hurting them right because I was lying to them.
And they were people I called every day, that I
spent most of my weekends with, that they were my friends,
(09:16):
some of them my best friends. And I think about
that now, I mean, that's really hard.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
When Sarah says this, she's really talking about two people
who trusted her deeply. In this episode, we're going to
hear from both of them. And these aren't just stories
about friendship. They're about what happens when you meet someone
a confidant who seems to get you and understand what
you're going through, someone who listens quietly with what seems
(09:51):
like empathy. But here in lies the danger. What if
that very person takes your most personal struggles and uses
them to their advantage, sees them as an opportunity. Then
the line between empathy and manipulation is thinner than we'd
care to admit. And sometimes the people who know us
(10:14):
best are the ones we should fear the most. I'm
Jay Calburn and I'm Jess mchuughe and this is Deep
(10:36):
Cover Season six, The Truth About Sarah, Episode three, The Confidante.
Speaker 5 (11:20):
Last fall, Jake and I, along with our producer Amy,
went on a road trip to Rhode Island. We wanted
to meet the people in Sarah's inner circle, people who
were closest to her, who each knew some part of
the truth. One morning, Amy and I went to meet
someone named Sam. We're just going to use her first
name to protect her privacy. We spoke at her boyfriend's house,
(11:43):
sitting around the kitchen table. Sam is in her fifties
with short blonde hair. She's a physical therapist and for
years she was Sarah's physical therapist.
Speaker 6 (11:54):
She was really kind. She definitely knew me, and she
knew I think what I wanted to talk about type thing,
if that makes sense.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
What was it that drew you to her in those early.
Speaker 6 (12:10):
Yeaies, it definitely was her intelligence. I mean her intelligence
like just sparked something in me.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
Sarah and Sam first met in the fall of twenty eighteen,
just a few months after Sarah's wedding to Nicole, the
wedding attended by all her VFW friends. By this point,
Sarah was fully immersed in this veteran role. Sam told
me about the moment when Sarah first came in for
a consultation.
Speaker 6 (12:37):
She was really quiet and reserved.
Speaker 7 (12:41):
You know.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
She answered questions, but very kind of matter of fact,
definitely seemed like things were she was uncomfortable with, Like
she didn't want me to look at her hip.
Speaker 5 (12:53):
This was the Sarah who, in her own words, had
always been able to quote, keep her mouth shut and
be quiet and not share anything, someone who let the
silences do the talking. But Sarah did say she had
been injured in Iraq.
Speaker 6 (13:07):
She said they hit an id and she got hit
with the door that got blown in and a hitter
and the hit. She wasn't really limping this because this
wasn't a brand new injury. This is something that happened
a long time ago, so it was more like a
chronic thing.
Speaker 5 (13:20):
Sam had worked with trauma patients before, so when Sarah
didn't want to show Sam her scar, she didn't push. Plus,
she already knew a little about Sarah's supposed military past
because one of Sarah's Jim buddies had connected them. Sarah
got into a routine of twice weekly pt with Sam,
and eventually the Wounded Warrior Project started paying for it.
(13:44):
Sarah was part of their Independence Program. It's super selective
program for the most severely wounded veterans, usually people with
traumatic brain injuries, which Sarah claimed she had. Over many
months of these weekly appointments, these two women became friends.
They talk about nature, gardening, or books they both love reading.
(14:07):
They also talked about more in smith things. Sam was
recently divorced, and Sarah told her in that way she
does so well, I get it. My marriage isn't working
out either. Yeah, that's right. Sarah told Sam that she
was also getting divorced.
Speaker 6 (14:26):
It was less than a year after they got married
that she said that just the marriage wasn't working out
and did they were separated, but she also said they
did have an open marriage.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
None of this was true, at least not according to
Sarah's wife, Nicole. At the time, they were still living together,
still married, and not in an open marriage. But that's
not what she told Sam. This, by the way, is
also classic Sarah, as we've learned, and it's a pattern
(15:00):
I've seen with women scammers in general. They often find
emotional common ground with victims, even when that shared trauma
is totally made up. And it worked.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
I think, like anything, basically, just you spend more time
with someone and then you just appreciate who that person is,
and then you find yourself wanting to spend more and
more time. We just like enjoyed our time together and
then it just turned into more.
Speaker 5 (15:31):
And by more, Sam means Sam and Sarah went from
having a professional relationship to a friendship to a love
affair one that was really romantic. Started going on a
ton of trips together.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
Let's see, we went to Florida, we went to Vail,
we went to the Bahamas, so we went to California,
and then like you know, little driving around New England
type stuff, and it wasn't just a fling.
Speaker 5 (16:03):
Their lives became really entwined. Much of this I actually
learned from other interviews. Sarah would talk about Sam as
her partner so much that it got really confusing for
us as we reported this. There were times I would
talk to someone for this story and they'd mentioned Sarah's
significant other, and I had to double check, who did
(16:25):
you think was Sarah's wife? A woman named Sam or
a woman named Nicole. Oftentimes people said Sam Sarah was
living a full on double life with Sam, a second
double life because she was still living with her actual
wife at the time, Nicole. Still, Sarah found a way
to spend lots of time with Sam. In fact, Sarah
(16:48):
and Sam would socialize with Sarah's VFW pals. Sam met
Sarah's mom and a brother. Sarah told Sam she was
really close with her five siblings and talked about them
all the time.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
She told me that she had a twin who was
also marine and died in combat, and then she had
two older brothers and they were all like in the military. Yeah,
and she said that her dad was a two star general.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
Sarah would show Sam pictures of her five brothers with
their wives and kids, Brody, Joel, Oliver. She'd tell her
about their marriage spats, or what they were dealing with
at work, about their childhood growing up in Georgia. One
brother in particular was worrying Sarah Joel. She told Sam
(17:33):
that he was also a VET who now did private
military contracting.
Speaker 6 (17:39):
He decided that he was going to do this mission
because they would make a lot of money for these missions.
Speaker 5 (17:45):
Sarah told Sam that while Joel was on this mission,
he got shot and ended up in a coma, and
that her mom flew to the Middle East to bring
him back to the US, but the doctors couldn't revive him.
They told Sarah that he would never wake up. One day,
(18:06):
Sarah tells Sam, I need to fly to Georgia now.
I have to be the one to take him off
of life support.
Speaker 6 (18:16):
I said, I'll go with you, and this is gonna
be a really hard thing. I'll go with you. You know,
we can fly down there and you know I can
support you. And She's like, no, no, it's fine, I'll do it.
And she called me at two o'clock in the morning.
I'll never freak. She called me at two o'clock in
the morning and said that it's done and he was gone.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
Sam was devastated for Sarah. Here was this woman dealing
with all of these injuries and now this, and just
to zoom out for a second because it can be
easy to get lost in Sarah's world. The people in
those photos that Sarah shared, they were real people with
(18:53):
real lives of their own. They just weren't Sarah's brothers.
This version of Sarah, the person with the big military
family from Georgia, it's someone only a few people saw.
And my take is that. But maybe it's because she
couldn't really let Sam into her family life, because her
(19:14):
whole family had watched her Mary Nicole, they'd been to
the home that she and Cole still shared. But I
think it's deeper than that. Sarah seems to have understood
something fundamental. Tragedy brings us together, whether it's a friendship
or a romantic partnership. Being vulnerable enough with another person
(19:37):
to let them help you through a crisis, stand by
you at a funeral or a hospital bed. This is
where real intimacy is created, and Sarah seems to have
taken this idea and just run with it. Same of course,
didn't know any of this at the time. She continued
(19:58):
bringing Sarah deeper into her world, her real world.
Speaker 6 (20:03):
She was very very meshed into my life. She knew
my family intimately.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
Sam's mother has been battle stage three ovarian cancer for years.
So while Sam drove her mother up to Boston for
treatment at Dana Farber, Sarah would help out. She'd help
Sam's kids with their homework, plan meals for the family,
walk her mother's dog, and get this. While Sam was
taking care of her mother's illness, holding her hand through chemo,
(20:29):
she was also doing the same for Sarah. Sarah had
told her the cancer lie too, said she had lung cancer.
Sarah told Sam, I'm terrified, overwhelmed with medical results. I
just can't take any more bad news. So Sam started
receiving Sarah's test results, and then she would be the
(20:50):
one to relay those results to Sarah more than once.
Sam remembers sitting anxiously in her pet practice, refreshing her email,
waiting for results to come in.
Speaker 6 (21:03):
I remember crying in my practice, getting bad, bad news,
But then I remember getting really great news and then
being able to tell her and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 8 (21:12):
It was a big rollercoaster.
Speaker 9 (21:15):
It's awful.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
It was awful. Yeah, there was a lot of emotional
strife on my part, you know, a lot.
Speaker 5 (21:24):
As both Sarah's partner and her caregiver. Sam was in
Sarah's world twice over totally enmeshed. Fast forward to January
twenty twenty two, the moment when everything started to spiral
out of control. News was getting around that Sarah may
(21:47):
have lied about a great many things, including her service
in the Marines, her medals, possibly even her claims of
having cancer. When the news first reached Sam, she was
in total disbelief. She'd seen a pile of proof over
the years, her enrollment in the Wounded Warrior Independent Program,
(22:10):
years of blood work that she'd received directly from the VA.
Sam was trying to wrap her head around this, so
she hopped on the phone with one of Sarah's VFW buddies,
a guy named Justin. Had gotten to know each other
over the years. She wanted his perspective.
Speaker 6 (22:26):
Can you believe this?
Speaker 8 (22:26):
This is crazy.
Speaker 6 (22:27):
Someone's making this up, you know, Like, why would they
do this? Why would they make this up about her?
This is insane, Sam told Justin.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
I've seen years of medical documents, even her cancer diagnosis.
There's no way Sarah's lying. How would someone even make
that up? More after the break.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
While Jess was meeting with Sam, I was just a
few miles away meeting with Justin. He's the guy that
Sam called to get a reality check. When the rumors
first started, Justin was one of Sarah's buddies from the VFW,
and initially, like Sam, he was very much in disbelief.
Even now, knowing everything he knows about Sarah, Justin still
(23:26):
struggles to wrap his head around everything that happened.
Speaker 9 (23:30):
I'll be honest, I was a little hesitant to kind
of relive this, but I think now we're going to
tell a story, I think it needs to be told fully,
and so that's that's why I'm here.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Justin is in his early fifties. He's fit, he looks
like he could be part of a marketing campaign for
Peloton or something, and he has this really disarming, gentle
energy about him. Feels like an old soul to me.
I wanted to talk to Justin for a whole bunch
of reasons, but mainly because Justin's story. It's really compelling
(24:08):
in its own right, which is probably why Sarah was
drawn to it. Justin spent most of his career as
an officer in the Navy as an aviator, and when
he looks back on his life on all the dangers,
all the near misses, all those moments that quietly changed
the course of things. He often thinks back to two
(24:30):
thousand and eight, when he was in his mid thirties
stationed in Iraq, and what he remembers is the fog.
The fog came every night, thick and heavy with the wind.
It got so bad some nights they could barely breathe
this fog. It would stay with Justin in the years
to come in ways that he could never have foreseen.
(24:53):
It would lead him right into the haze of Sarah
Kavanaugh's deceptions. The fog in Iraq. It started like this.
Speaker 9 (25:03):
We weren't on a base called Taji, which is outside
of Baghdad, and we're we lived. We had this kind
of compound area. It was about fifty yards from a
burn pit. And at night the wind would shift and
our whole living area was enveloped in what was a fog.
(25:25):
You couldn't you. You could barely see in front of you,
a fog of what smelt like burning plastic. Every night.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
This fog that Justin's talking about, it's really a miasma
of smoke and fumes. It came from a burn pit,
which is how the military disposed of waste in both
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 9 (25:47):
Like, when you eat, there's no there's not there's no
water to do dishes. So when you go eat, everything
is off plastic and that all gets thrown away. They
dig a big pit. They throw all this stuff, plastic,
medical waste, batteries, whatever, into this giant pit. They throw
jet fuel on it and they light it on fire.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Justin was responsible for nearly five HUND service members. Their
safety was on his shoulders, and he and his leadership
team were worried about the long term effects of the fog.
Speaker 9 (26:19):
We knew this wasn't gonna be good, right, and the
contractor kept claiming that they do They did air tests
and it was it was, it was okay, But I
didn't buy that for a second.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Then one day it all kind of came to a head.
Speaker 9 (26:34):
My master chief and I actually drove out there to
the burn pit because we just saw this thick black
smoke coming out, and we're like, what the hell's going on?
And we went out there and you know, just like
yelled at the guy basically like what the hell are
you doing?
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Justin says the contractor just shrugged and said that's what
I was told to do. No explanations, just business as usual.
It would be more than a decade later before Justin
learned the real consequences of those burn pits. By then,
he was living in Rhode Island with his wife and
three kids. He was happily retired from the military. All
(27:14):
was good until he started to feel this small ache.
Speaker 9 (27:18):
I felt like, what it was a slightly pinched nerve
on my left chest. And you know, I exercise, so
I get pinched nerves and stuff for once in a while.
So I'm like, oh, it'll just go away.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
But it didn't go away, and eventually Justin's doctor at
the VA suggested that he get a CT scan just
to be safe. That's when they found the mass in
his lungs. At first, the doctors told him not to worry.
It probably wasn't anything too serious. I mean, he was
so young, so healthy, so fit. But then he went
(27:53):
to see a pulmonologist at the VA and learned he
had stage four lung cancer.
Speaker 9 (28:00):
It was a huge shock. I'm working out, I'm healthy,
everything's going great, and then someone tells you you're about
to die. I just like I couldn't wrap my brain
around it. My wife was I just kind of like
broke down.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Justin says his wife had always been his lifeline. Even so,
this cancer diagnosis was uncharted territory for Justin and his family.
Speaker 9 (28:30):
When you know you're dying, it's a very lonely thing.
I mean, it's very comforting that I have a family
around me and a wife to support me and everything.
But at the same time, you're the one that's dying
and you're the one going through this personally, and it
(28:51):
feels like you're very much alone.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
But he did have someone who seemed to get it
at a personal level, and that was Sarah Kavanaugh. Sarah
and Justin knew each other from the VFW. They've been
close for several years, ever since Justin joined the Post
back in two thousand. In seventeen, and that whole time,
Sarah herself claimed that she had been fighting cancer, lung cancer.
(29:17):
Sarah claimed the cancer came from her military service, claimed
her vehicle had been hit by an ied and she'd
inhaled the metal particles in the blast. For some people,
cancer is now a chronic condition, something you can manage
and live with, and that seemed to be the case
with Sarah.
Speaker 9 (29:37):
So I immediately went to Sarah, thinking, okay, well, there's
someone going through the same experience I am. I don't
feel so lonely anymore. I was still scared, but what
she was sharing, what her experience was someone who's already
started this journey is telling me, you know, things are
going to be okay. That definitely helped.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Sarah had always been a friend, but in this moment,
their friendship seemed to take on a deeper meaning.
Speaker 9 (30:07):
No one really was in my shoes except her. At
least that's what I thought, here's another veteran that's going
through the same thing I'm going through, so at least
she knows we can support each other. And then we
started actually opening up more about our treatments and how
our treatments were going.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Sarah told Justin she was on an experimental dose of
an immunotherapy drug and it was working, but according to Sarah,
the VA was cutting back on her treatment. This story
hit home for Justin. He'd faced his own bureaucratic roadblocks
within the VA. In fact, he'd eventually gone outside the
(30:48):
system to Dana Farber in Boston to get the experimental
treatment that he needed, and it seemed to be working,
which gave Justin an idea.
Speaker 9 (30:59):
I thought well, Dana Farbers is this amazing place, and
I know that they can help her. And I said, well,
do you have private health insurance because you need to
go to someplace like Dana Farber and get real help,
because the VA is not going to help you. And
she said, well, I don't have or I can't afford it.
(31:19):
She just kept saying like she couldn't. That was too
much for her.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
The whole thing was frustrating for Justin, and he felt
like he couldn't just sit there and do nothing.
Speaker 9 (31:30):
We veterans look out for each other, and I'm not
going to sit here and let a fellow what I
thought at the time was a fellow veteran die from
lack of treatment when I know there's an alternative if
I can help it. So I said, look, I will
at least begin by paying for this insurance for you
(31:56):
to be able to go to Dana Farber.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
It was an incredibly generous offer, which Sarah turned down.
Speaker 9 (32:05):
She initially said no, I can't ask you to do that, No, no, no,
but then she kept telling me that, you know, she
wasn't doing well, and eventually, you know, I said, look,
I don't want you to die.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
At last, Sarah agreed. In the months that followed, Justin
gave her money to pay for private insurance, over five
thousand dollars in total, all in the hope that it
would keep her alive. Then one day, Justin gets a
call from Dave Ainslie at the VFW. You know, the
(32:42):
guy with the handlebar mustache. He was the previous commander
at the post before Sarah.
Speaker 9 (32:50):
Dave told me like, hey, you know, like I got
to tell you something about Sarah, and she's you know,
she's fake, She's not a veteran, and I was just
in shock and trying to just like wrap my brain
around it.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Dave explained how he tried to retrieve Sarah's discharge papers
her d D two fourteen, and how Sarah had been
one step ahead of him, absconding with the paperwork before
Dave could get his hands on it. Justin says that
he believed Dave, but part of him resisted, part of
him was in denial. He kept asking himself, who would
(33:25):
do something like this and why. Around this exact same time,
rumors began to swirl about Sarah being a fraud, and
then Justin heard from Sam. Her head was also spinning,
trying to make sense of all this.
Speaker 9 (33:43):
Sam and I talked on the phone and Sam was
still in i think, still in denial, and said, this
is not true. She actually does have cancer. I've seen
the record, her medical records.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Because remember Sam, she'd seen all the proof, the wounded
Warrior enrollment forms, stacks of medical records, someone claiming to
be Sarah's VA caseworker had even sent Sam official docum,
blood work, diagnoses, intake forms. It all looked legit. It
(34:15):
was enough to give Justin a moment of pause.
Speaker 9 (34:19):
There was a little bit of a question in my mind.
I'd say, she's actually seen medical records. What does that mean?
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Like, was there some other explanation here, a story that
made sense of it all, that turned the world right
side up again and somehow transformed Sarah back into Sarah.
And if not, well, then so many other questions bubbled
to the surface, like where did that stack of medical
records come from? And what if the rumors were true?
(34:50):
What did that mean for Justin? If the one person
who got it, who'd been through it, what if that
person was just performing, mimicking his own pain, where did
that leave him?
Speaker 5 (35:10):
In the days after that phone conversation with justin. Sam
still held on to the hope that maybe this was
just some terrible misunderstanding. Sarah kept maintaining her innocence, saying
she had the paperwork to prove it. Sam says she
believed it, maybe because she wanted to believe it. At
(35:32):
one point, Sam was driving to work and talking to
Sarah on the phone about all of this. She got frustrated.
She asked Sarah, begged her, really.
Speaker 6 (35:44):
Where's the paperwork? And she's like, I can't find it.
I'm like, what what do you mean you can't find it?
You're the most organized person I know. And she's like
then she said, it's all a lie. And I was like, wait, wait,
were you.
Speaker 7 (35:56):
Ever in the military?
Speaker 5 (35:59):
And that's when Sarah finally said it, a one word confession. No,
she'd never been in the military.
Speaker 6 (36:08):
I literally turned around and I was going to my work.
I turned around and I went right to her house.
Speaker 5 (36:13):
What was that drive?
Speaker 6 (36:15):
Like, I don't even remember. I don't even remember like
that drive. I don't remember walking into her house. I
remember sitting on her couch and like me like telling her,
asking her is this real?
Speaker 7 (36:27):
Is this real?
Speaker 6 (36:27):
Is this real?
Speaker 7 (36:28):
Is this real? You know?
Speaker 8 (36:30):
And she was like no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 5 (36:35):
It was an avalanche of betrayals. The cancer, the military service,
the family down in Georgia, the brother she'd taken off
life support. None of it was true. Sarah had been
lying to her every single day for years about nearly everything,
even things unrelated to her stolen valor scam, like still
(36:57):
being married to Nicole, and in doing so, she had
made Sam the other woman. We actually talked to Sarah
about this very moment.
Speaker 4 (37:08):
I remember her coming to my house and having that
conversation and her sitting on the couch across from me
and telling her the truth, like watching it hit her,
you know, watching it overcome her. It was like watching
her heartbreak, you know. And she started to cry and
told me she couldn't do this and how could I
(37:30):
do it? And all of those things.
Speaker 5 (37:34):
Sarah had spent hours and hours with Sam and her
family in their home, nursed the wounds of Sam's divorce,
helps her find happiness again. Sarah hurt Sam in all
of these intimate, profound ways, and then she made that pain, dirty, shameful.
Speaker 8 (37:53):
I'm still coping with it. Would it be upset?
Speaker 7 (37:58):
Now?
Speaker 6 (38:09):
Will come up and I'll be like, oh did that
really happen, and I think probably not, it was probably
a lie.
Speaker 8 (38:18):
Because I'll still like be.
Speaker 7 (38:20):
Like driving or whatever, and then memory will come and
they I'll be like, oh, I wonder how Brody's doing,
like things like that, you know, like it's so crazy.
Speaker 5 (38:32):
To me, Brody one of Sarah's fake brothers. Memories like
this come back to Sam even now. And then there
was the fact that Sarah was also Sam's patient, that
she'd been getting physical therapy from her for years, and
some of those bills had been paid for by a
(38:52):
wounded warrior. That meant that the very basis of their
relationship was a theft, a crime. She sat on the
couch confronting Sarah, the implications became crystal clear.
Speaker 6 (39:06):
I was like, oh my god. I was like, you
basically stole money. And I said to go, You're gonna
go to jail, Sarah, And She's like, you think.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
Next time. On deep Cover, I said.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Like, hey, we are at your house.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
It's the police. Are you in the house.
Speaker 4 (39:32):
We need you to come to the door.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Deep Cover The Truth About Sarah was produced by Amy
Gaines McQuaid and Tali Emlin, additional production support by Sonya Gerwit.
Speaker 5 (39:52):
Our show is edited by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer
is Jacob Smith, mastering by Jake Gorsky.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Original scoring in our theme were composed by Luis Gara.
Our show art was designed by Sean Carney, fact checking
by A Robbins.
Speaker 5 (40:10):
Special thanks to Sarah Nis, Izzy Carter, Daphne Chen, Jake
Flanagan and Greta Cone. Additional thanks to Vicki Merrick, I'm
Jess McHugh.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
And I'm Jake Halpern. My co host, Jess McHugh is
currently researching a book on female con artists.
Host
Jake Halpern
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